When buying a house, it's common advice to treat it as an investment. To a certain extent, that's a good idea, but as some experts have pointed out, it's a little more complicated than that.

As financial blog 20 Something Finance points out, when accounting for inflation, housing prices have only grown about 35% in the last 125 years. Moreover, prices have roughly kept pace with inflation for the last 60 years, which means if you bought a home in 1970 and sold it today, you wouldn't have much more buying power than you did at the start. That's not to say no one can make money on the housing market, but it's far from the surefire moneymaker it gets treated as sometimes:

Housing prices are just like stocks, in many ways. We all have an idea whether they might go up or down, but nobody really knows. Trying to market time a housing purchase and sale is no more legitimate than trying to do the same with a stock. It’s a guessing game, with the winners being lucky.

The author of this post isn't the only one who feels this way. The Wall Street Journal asked a panel of experts and nearly all of them agreed that buying a house purely from an investment perspective was a bad idea. As one expert said:

People shouldn't think of the houses they live in as investments. Doing that can fog up their thinking and lead them to make decisions that aren't optimal for their well-being. You should buy a house because you and your family enjoy living in it, the schools are great and you enjoy being part of the community. The tax advantages certainly come in handy, too.

That's not to say there are no upsides. Houses provide certain tax benefits, they act as assets that can make some money (say, by renting an empty room), and of course they are actual things you own, as opposed to paying the same amount every month to rent a place and walking away after ten years empty handed. Just be careful about expecting your home to make you money over the long-term purely by virtue of it being a house.